Link Analysis Exercise
Read and refer to Hot Text, chap 7: Links. Work with a selected or assigned web article from the list below. You can do this on paper. Be ready to hand in notes and paragraphs on Tuesday, however.
First, make some notes on what kind of article it is, and consider its audience fit (Hot Text), and audience niche.
For each link, make notes on
- what is linked to: internal or external? blog, website, article, scholarly article? wikipedia entry? amazon book? a video, image, sound? the source of an embedded image, video, sound? other? Get specific: not just "website."
How the link text is handled
- Is it a phrase, name, title, word or number, sentence, url, brand name, image, quotation? Does it incorporate text from the target? (word, clause, phrase)
- Where is it placed in the sentence
- Is it separated from the main text?
- Other placement
What the link doing: the relationship of link context to target. Take your cues from the source, but also from the target and its context. Some possibles. There are others.
- tell more
- illustrate
- exemplify
- provide evidence: for? against? what kind of evidence?
- give credit
- lead to action
- solve a puzzle or resolve a question posed by the link text
- tell us something different from the link text (as in irony, or creating a shift in text - context relation. This is using the link as a rhetorical figure.)
- other
From your list of notes, draft a couple of paragraphs in which you characterize how this article incorporates and uses links. No judgements: We're looking for a consideration of how the writer manages and uses links to other sources in the article: be neutral, fair, complete.
- Hypertext Mag
- The Register
- Critical look at House of Leaves
- Language Log
- The Guardian
- Slate
- TheNextWeb
CategoryExercise
